James Poulos writes about political news, focusing on our choices for liberty and our options for reform. He's a columnist at The Daily Beast, the host of the Free Radicals podcast, and the frontman of a band called Black Hi-Lighter.

Floridians and readers of news everywhere are transfixed by the fact that a naked man had to be shot to death on Miami‘s MacArthur Causeway after officers found him eating the face off of another man. It’s an invitation to publish something so far outside the realm of standard ‘sensationalism’ that we may as well call it fantasy journalism:

some have likened the attack to one by a zombie. Details of the unthinkable attack included police reporting that when they ordered the cannibal to stop, he looked up with blood on his face and growled at officers.

Monsters in our midst! Our darkest visions come to life! The world is slipping out of control! Our very humanity is disintegrating before our very eyes!

The president of the Miami Fraternal Order of Police, Armando Aguilar believes the entire incident is the fault of a new drug trend that has led to similar incidents. Emergency room doctors at Jackson Memorial Hospital said they too have seen a major increase in cases linked to the street drug called “bath salts” or the new LSD.

Parties! Festivals with superlatives in their names! The true menace, uncovered!

Like a hellish version of the DirectTV commercials that warn you not to buy cable because you’ll wake up in a ditch, the news media and our criminal justice system work together, wittingly or not, to craft a fantasy narrative about the sources of crazy chaos — the things that encourage public opinion to predicate itself on a sense of generalized dread and unmasterable fate.

First, they breathe a damp air of fantasy onto the news: one person’s ‘freakout’ becomes an incipient trend — the promise of an already-developing, newly unthinkable reality. (This is the first of how many nude, snarling men, scrambling into the streets to gnaw each others’ mouths off?) Then, they pivot to strike a pose of objectivity. They strike such a stark and abrupt contrast with the lurid panting that preceded it that it takes on the feeling of fact. The grim search for an explanation — there must be an explanation — swiftly leads, with apparent inevitability, to long-suspected culprits such as mysterious drugs and large parties. We’d better empower the authorities to crack down on these otherwise uncontrollable things. Otherwise, we might be next out there on the streets, getting our lattes spilled and our temporomandibular ligaments ripped out by a naked, inhuman freak. Otherwise, it’s just a matter of time before that’s us…or our children.

But wait. There’s something buried down there in the paranoia and power-worship. Is it…

The suspected cannibal has been identified by the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner’s officer as 31-year-old Rudy Eugene. Eugene may have been homeless at the time of the attack…

…the truth? Inside the quasi-undead were-hyena is a…31-year-old homeless human being named Rudy? Maybe his possible homelessness is a potential fact worth following up on. Maybe the details of his journey from a baby boy to a child to a teenager to a man to a monster are worth uncovering and sharing with the reading public. Maybe the purpose of such a humane investigation isn’t anything so shallow or easily politicized as ‘compassion’ or ‘empathy’, but the reinforcement of a simple but sobering statement of tradeoffs. It’s as easy as can be to crack down on monsters — ban whatever places and things they associate with, throw them in jail forever, or simply destroy them like mad dogs or injured horses. What’s difficult is dealing with the reality of how many monsters we’re producing — and not from scratch, either. We make monsters out of people.

And if you don’t like assigning responsibility that generally, let’s say that we allow monsters to be made out of people. Human beings. Just like the rest of us. Their personal responsibility plays a role, of course. Some people are too entranced by darkness or too afraid to accept being merely and fully human. But the politics of personal responsibility is secondary to the simpler question of how many monsters we can accept walking, shuffling, snarling, hurting, feasting, and killing among us. Fantasy journalism makes it seem like there are more inexplicably crazy people than there are. But there are way more explicably crazy people than we’d like to imagine. Who will turn our monsters back into humans? If the market can help us answer that question, media and law enforcement will really have something to dream about.

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Armando Aguilar, president of the FOP, please get your facts straight. Bath salts ARE NOT LSD nor are they like LSD. They are stimulants.

According to The National Institute on Drug Abuse, “We know, for example, that these products often contain various amphetamine-like chemicals, such as methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MPDV), mephedrone and pyrovalerone.”

The web site goes on to explain the dangers of these new and unknown stimulants.

LSD is an entirely different thing. While currently a Schedule I drug it is being using in several psychiatric studies and with great success for various ailments.

“We’d better empower the authorities to crack down on these otherwise uncontrollable things. Otherwise, we might be next out there on the streets, getting our lattes spilled and our temporomandibular ligaments ripped out by a naked, inhuman freak. Otherwise, it’s just a matter of time before that’s us…or our children.”

Won’t someone think of the children? Clearly this event signals a coming change to all parts of America and likely the world. We obviously need some new knee-jerk reaction based laws to deal with this terrible and ever more increasing in frequency kind of event. I’m getting hungry can can’t decide if I should have a burger or the dude I share an office with. Time will tell.

Demon possession, We must learn to recognize it. Read the old testament-it is real.Jesus commanded us to “Cast out demons”. Just look around at what is going on in our society- more and more bizarre occurances . I see the word “zombie” being printed about this face eating man- what is a zombie but a demon. Think about it before you dismiss the idea.

Placing blame for the attempted consumption of someone’s face on obscure, barely researched designer drugs is a poor accusation at best. If archaic U.S. drug prohibition laws were non-existant, society would be able to choose drugs that are well researched, and make an informed choice before using them.

In reality, prohibition is the norm. This creates a market for enterprising illicit chemists to create new, harmful, and more affordable drugs (designer analogs of drugs) that they can get away with selling legally until the government bans them. These drug laws are harming more people than they are helping.

An example, would be MDA (3,4-Methylenedioxyamphetamine) which was made illegal (schedule 1) in 1970. Since MDA was made illegal, chemists synthesized its analog MDMA (also known as the incredibly popular drug Ecstasy) to bypass the ban on MDA. This was legal until 1977.